Nomesorah – any sources that would say to separate politics from “religion”? Or is it that we’re looking from the outside of Judaism now, as “higher criticism” would demand? And that it is us thinkers who are determining the appropriate limits of “religion”?
For a torah jew, there’s no such thing as something “outside the purview of torah” because Hashem created the world through it; everything in the world is a reflection of that Torah, hafoch bo vehafoch ba dekulah boh
Reform said to seperate religion from…. culture, politics, basically everything outside of shul. That’s where you’re headed when you place artificial limits on what Hashem has to say on a given issue.
Re, politics affecting halacha – i agree (wow!) With this to an extent, as we see zionist rabbis routinely mix their politics into their “psakim”, such as sacrificing Jewish life for a state, converting goyim who maintain the arbitrary Israeli standard of traditional observance, skirting shmitah, terumos and maasros (but yishuv eretz yisroel is the biggest mitzvah….just were going to be extremely lenient in ita mitzvos, but pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…)
Where we differ is that if you are first a big person in learning, politics will not affect your halachik jurisprudence. Rav miller was very political, but it was entirely based on his learning. It’s the same risk of learning secular studies; the extent to which it will affect you depends on how much you’ve honed yourself as a product of your learning, how much of your daas is daas torah (which is how reb elchonon defines the term ‘daas torah’, a cumulative, quantifiable measure of how much of your thinking process is fueled by torah)
This is why true gedolei yisroel rejected politically advantageous movements like mizrachi, when they were fraught with hashkofa problems.